Senior Backend Engineer, Engineering Scalability

About Hotjar

Ready for your dream job? Join our growing team today. At Hotjar, we’re creating Product Experience Insights software for digital product teams. We help show how users behave and what they feel strongly about, so product teams can deliver real value, fast.

Our team works on the compelling challenges that come with large-scale web traffic and analytics, on a product that has a real impact on the thousands of users we support around the world. We work in an agile environment, 100% remotely, and actively encourage both personal and professional growth; always be learning is one of our core values.

Headquartered on the beautiful island of Malta, in the ‘heart’ of the Mediterranean, Hotjar is a successful start-up that operates on a fully remote basis, and with a key emphasis on personal development.

Spread throughout the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia, our team casts a wide net across a multitude of locations, lifestyles, and backgrounds. It’s our differences that make us interesting, and our shared belief in Hotjar’s core values that bind us together.

Hotjar's culture is driven by respect, transparency, collaboration, and direct feedback. We have no room on our team for disrespect, office politics, or discrimination of any kind. We're obsessed with communicating with our users as well as within the team. We hate bureaucracy and slow-moving organizations – but we're suckers for well-defined processes. We love lean, iterative improvements, and success is measured by the value we create for our users.

Learn more about our company culture and what it's like to work at Hotjar on our careers site (careers.hotjar.com) and company blog (www.hotjar.com/blog).

Here at Hotjar, we welcome team members of all backgrounds, identities, and experiences. Working with respect is built into our core values: we are honest, tolerant, and inclusive. We celebrate the uniqueness and strength found in diversity. We all commit to creating a safe working environment and are allies to those less privileged. And we fully believe that living by these values helps us to make our company, and our product, better.

The Position

We're looking for an enthusiastic and resourceful software engineer, passionate about building Hotjar foundational systems and infrastructure, someone who loves being part of a team, whilst enjoying the autonomous nature of working remotely.

Working as part of a fully remote squad in the Engineering Enablement tribe, your role will be centered around engineering core systems to serve the scaling needs of our product. We are looking for people with strong software engineering fundamentals and experienced with Python, familiar with high throughput backend services, distributed architectures. Hotjar tech stack is heavily reliant on AWS and Kubernetes, and most of our code is written in Python.

We use Kafka as a message broker, Traefik as our Ingress and a lot of different storage systems (Postgres, Redis, Clickhouse, Elasticsearch). As part of this role you will be exposed to a lot of the infrastructure our platform and product is based on.

What you will do:

• Own backend services end to end, from creating the first RFC to supporting them in production
• Create a platform for backend services, by leveraging our existing stack (Traefik proxy, Kafka, Kubernetes) or by introducing new ideas and models for fast onboarding and iteration
• Dive into event-based architecture patterns and abstract them to make it easy to adopt our message bus stack
• Optimize the way we distribute backend tasks using messaging queues - Celery is our default now
• Help product squads in an hands-on way when extracting or creating new backend services
• Create documentation and guidelines for our standards, so teams can understand what's running under the hood and how to debug or perform fast experiments with their services
• Leverage your expertise to provide feedback during code reviews or in RFC documents and design proposals

Please do not apply for this role if you are not physically located in Europe, Africa or the Middle East (UTC-1 to UTC+3).

Requirements

• 5+ years background in building and maintaining high throughput web services or backend systems
• 5+ years demonstrable experience with Python
• Familiar with the use of databases and message brokers/queues at scale - PostgreSQL, Redis, ClickHouse, Kafka, RabbitMQ are some of the main technologies we use
• Familiar with public cloud infrastructure - we deploy everything on AWS, but if you have experience with GCP or Azure that’s fine too.
• Experience with Linux and system programming a big plus
• Desire to work in a respectful, transparent, and collaborative work environment, following Hotjar’s company values, culture and ways of working.
• Must submit to a background check confidentially processed by our third-party.

Our Hiring Process

1. Review - We review applications to screen for a variety of criteria.
2. Intro call - A quick chat with one of our Tech Recruiters to get to know you a little better.
3. 1-Day task - A paid take-home technical task, to assess coding abilities.
4. Tech interview - An interview with Hotjar engineers, learning more about your technical and team experiences.
5. Team fit interview - An interview with a member of our engineering leadership team.
6. Offer - We make an offer to the candidate we feel is the best for the role.

Benefits

• Compensation Range: The compensation range for a team member in this role is €80,000 to €105,000 annually where the offer typically falls in the range of €80,000 to €90,000.
• Fully remote working environment. We are and always will be a fully remote team. Hotjarians are free to live and work where they please, provided that time zones work for their teams.
• Home office budget: € 2,500. Topped by 500 EUR per year. We help people set up their office as soon as they walk through our virtual door—in the way that works best for them.
• Working space budget: €2,400/year. This can be anything from speedy home internet to buying your favorite drinks and snacks or joining a coworking space a few days a week.
• Paid holiday leave: 40 days/year. To respect the diversity of our teams, we offer a total of 40 days paid leave. We don’t believe it’s our place to decide which public holidays to recognize without being exclusionary.
• Holiday budget: €2,000/year. Yeah, really. We give people budget to have fun and relax. We want to encourage our team to actually go on holiday and enjoy themselves!
• Wellbeing budget: €2,400/year. We care about everyone's wellbeing. This is a chance for people to practice their mental, spiritual, and physical fitness in whatever ways works best for them.
• Working together budget: €2,000/year. While we are a fully remote team sometimes we need that coworker connection. Get together with your colleagues and build relationships across teams to keep work life interesting.
• Company retreats. Even though we’re proud of our fully remote setup, we also love meeting face-2-face at our company retreats—hosted twice a year for a chance to meet the wider Hotjar team.
• Paid sick leave: 10 days/year. Sometimes, life throws in colds, migraines, and excessive trips to the bathroom. We understand—these things happen. So apart from holidays, we provide paid days off for physical or mental health.
• Paid parental leave: 16 weeks. We know that parents have the job of raising another set of minds and bodies. So we support moms and dads who are welcoming a new family member into this world.
• Paid exception leave. We know life happens, and we don’t want work—or unpaid leave—to contribute to these difficult times. We take these on a case-by-case basis, making it quick and easy to get the needed approval and support.
• Personal development budget: €1,000/year. What is this for? To help you learn about what you love and/or to help you develop the skills needed in your career. It's for you to decide.